Wednesday, May 07, 2008

A battle of wits between Man and Crow in Japan

Crows can be pretty be smart. Japan is currently wrestling with an burgeoning crow population, who have been increasingly causing blackouts by shorting out transmission wires with their nests.
Still, the crows have proven clever at foiling human efforts to control them. In Kagoshima, they are even trying to outsmart the Crow Patrol. The birds have begun building dummy nests as decoys to draw patrol members away from their real nests.

.... “Japanese react to crows because we fear them,” said Michio Matsuda, a board member of the Wild Bird Society of Japan and author of books on crows. “We are not sure sometimes who is smarter, us or the crows.”
Unfortunately, because of their inability to control the population, cities have been turning to lethal means of control.

source

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